The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9b-13) in the English of 1525:
O oure father which arte in heve
halowed be thy name.
Let thy kyngdome come.
Thy wyll be fulfilled
as well in erth as it ys in heven.
Geve vs this daye oure dayly breede.
And forgeve vs oure treaspases
eve as we forgeve oure trespacers.
And leade vs not into teptacion:
but delyver vs fro evell.
thyne is ye kyngedome and ye power and ye glorye for ever.
Amen.
English (500- ) is the most widely understood language in the world. It was the language of British Empire, which ruled a fourth of the world in the early 1900s. It is currently the main language of world business, science and the Internet. Like Latin 500 years ago in Europe, it is the preferred language of Dutch intellectuals and books of higher learning. It is taught at schools all over the world, even in countries that were never under British rule, like Ethiopia and Indonesia.
In 1800, English was a middling European language, like Polish. But the defeat of Napoleon and the growth of British and then American power has meant that for the past 200 years the top world power spoke English.
The rise of China could change all that, but sometimes imperial tongues outlast their rulers, like Latin, Greek and Aramaic – and even English itself in India and Nigeria. English is too useful to disappear quickly from the world stage.
In very rough numbers, about 1200 million have at least a working knowledge of English:
- 400 million as a native language in Britain, America, Australia, South Africa, Jamaica, etc.
- 300 million as a working second language in the countries of Asia and Africa that Britain once ruled
- 500 million as a language learned well enough at school to read this post. Mostly in Europe and China.
In 2010 there were about 300 to 450 million online whose English was good enough to edit the Wikipedia.
Words: Most of the commonly used words go back to Proto-Germanic, the ancient German of Roman times that English sprang from. The rest are mostly Latin and French, because until about 1600 most new things came from those who spoke Latin or French.
For most of its history, English was not considered a real language like Latin. Latin was the language books were written in. English was just something you spoke at home.
Writing: like many others, the English were taught to write by Christian missionaries. And since these missionaries spoke Latin, English to this day is written with Latin letters. A bad fit: English has far more sounds than Latin.
But it gets worse: English is written the way it was spoken in London in the 1400s! That was back when sea did not rhyme with see and people still said the k and the e in knife!
But the hardest thing about English are its idioms: strange ways of putting things that if taken word for word mean little. Like “give up” somehow means “to lose all hope”. Much to the despair of all those schoolchildren in Ethiopia.
– Abagond, 2006, 2016.
Heat map of native English speakers
Heat map for this blog at 11:44 GMT – which pretty much matches where English is known as a first or second language
See also:
- List of countries by English-speaking population
- The OED in two minutes – an animated world map showing where English borrowed words from between 1150 and 2010.
- England
- English alphabet
- Kinds of English:
- French
- Latin
- style guide
Abagond 
The French did rule England for a while
THE FRENCH NEVER CONQUEST ENGLAND
THE NORMANS WERE NOT FRENCH
The name “Normans” derives from “Northmen” or “Norsemen”
The Normans were the people who gave their names to Normandy, a region in northern France. They descended from the original Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of mostly Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock. Their identity first emerged in the first half of the tenth century, and gradually evolved over succeeding centuries until they disappeared as an ethnic group in the early thirteenth century. The name “Normans” derives from “Northmen” or “Norsemen”, after the Vikings from Scandinavia who founded Normandy (Northmannia in its original Latin).
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But by the time the Normans took over England they were speaking French and for our story that is what counts. From 1066 to about 1350 the top people in England spoke French – and when they spoke English it was more a broken Frenglish that they spoke, but in time that became the right way to speak English.
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But it gets worse: English is written the way it was spoken in London 500 years ago! That was before all those e’s at the ends of words became silent.
This is very true – although I assumed it may have been further back than that. Another example is words with silent “gh” such as “eight”. You can see a hint of the original pronunciation in the German word for 8, “acht”.
Interesting to contrast it with a language like Malay, which has been written in Roman script for only a relatively short time. Thus Malay has virtually no silent letters or incongruities like English, and is pronounced pretty much the same way it is currently written.
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Great article, but one thing bothered me:
‘Words: The most commonly used words are mostly from ancient German.’
This is inaccurate. ‘German’ and ‘Germanic’ are not the same thing. English and German sprang from a common source, the proto-Germanic language, which splintered and evolved into languages we have today (Icelandic, Norwegian, Dutch, English, German, Swedish, Danish, Faroese, etc.). English and German both came from the West Germanic branch, which is why we have so many similar words; they are cognates, not loanwords – and you will find many of these in the other Germanic languages I listed as well. (Not to say that we don’t have German loanwords, but those came later.)
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It is not wrong as in misleading, but wrong as in not how a professor would put it.
If I told my mother that English came from Proto-Germanic she would smile politely and not know what the hell I was talking about. The same with 99% of the people who will read this. But if I say it came from ancient German she would know just what I meant, especially since “ancient” would bring to mind ancient Rome, which would put her in the right period even.
In any case I updated it so that it has both:
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Indeed, I don’t see a great problem in using the term “Ancient German” to refer to “Proto-Germanic” as Modern German does trace back to Proto-Germanic, which would essentially be what Ancient German refers to.
Well, as long as you define the term you are using.
But I guess that means that it would be OK to call Proto-Germanic as Ancient English or Ancient Dutch?
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But that example of “give up” is NOT one somebody who knows a couple of Germanic languages would describe as ENGLISH idiom, as German “Aufgeben”, Dutch “Opgeven” and Frisian “Opjaan” are clearly the very same construction, with the same meaning, so we seem to be dealing with a shared Germanic, rather than idiomatic English, use of words.
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